CNN’s Candy Crowley asked John McCain this morning whether trading top Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was better than having to release the detainees when U.S. combat operations end in Afghanistan. McCain thinks that’s a false choice: Men like the the five commanders released, he believes, should be tried if possible, but just held indefinitely otherwise.

When pressed as to what authority or what assurances he’d trust to keep the five detainees from returning to terrorism, McCain simply said, “well, first of all, I wouldn’t have released them.”

“We’re not sending everybody home — even if we close Guantanamo, we’re going to send them to facilities in the United States of America,” McCain said.

Ideally, he explained, all of the Gitmo detainees would be tried, but McCain was adamant that especially the five released this past week were determined to be so dangerous that release was impossible.

Most of them have been there for a long time. Some of them were on hunger strike.

Lots of strange tropical diseases in the Caribbean. It'd be such a pity if the inmates wound up with a highly contagious disease which resulted in the sad deaths of nearly all of them. None of them has any worth while information now, it is so far out of date that it would be useless.

Why keep them alive? For pity? They have none. For charity? They deserve none. For humanity? They are not.

Sometimes Americans are too good for their own good. The UK held the fort in Afghanistan for 4 years, while the USA got on with dealing with Iraq. How many Taliban / AQ prisoners do we have? I think you'll find the answer is zero.